First Scan Search for Dark Photon Dark Matter with a Tunable Superconducting Radio-Frequency Cavity

Abstract

Dark photons have emerged as promising candidates for dark matter, and their search is a top priority in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology. We report the first use of a tunable niobium superconducting radio-frequency cavity for a scan search of dark photon dark matter with innovative data analysis techniques. We mechanically adjusted the resonant frequency of a cavity submerged in liquid helium at a temperature of $2$ K, and scanned the dark photon mass over a frequency range of $1.37$ MHz centered at $1.3$ GHz. Our study leveraged the superconducting radio-frequency cavity's remarkably high quality factors of approximately $10^{10}$, resulting in the most stringent constraints to date on a substantial portion of the exclusion parameter space on the kinetic mixing coefficient $\hat{I}\mu$ between dark photons and electromagnetic photons, yielding a value of $\hat{I}\mu <2.2\times 10^{-16}$.

14 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in PRL